Category: Personal

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The joy of joyriders

Had joyriders driving round the estate last night. One ploughed straight into the back of a parked van that a nice little old couple own. He legged it before anyone could even check if he was all right.

You think that that’ll be the end of the story but from that point on, the following groups of people turned up:

  • The police, to supervise and take down information and witness statements
  • The scene of crime officers to get evidence
  • A low-loader lorry to take away the crashed car
  • A dog unit to chase after the escaping teenager

So it was a couple of hours before the whole thing died down – always good late at night. Thank you joyriders.

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Happy Birthday blog

I’ve just noticed this blog’s first entry was on the 18th June 2005, which was yesterday. Happy first birthday blog!

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New SCHWIF2004 beta

I’ve updated SCHWIF2004’s latest beta to fix a bug where a warning would come up telling users they need OS X 10.3, even though they already have OS X 10.3. You can get the beta from the SCHWIF2004 page.

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Be and maintenance

As you may recall, I swapped my ISP to Be recently. They’re still providing the same download speed as before – 4.5Mbps, which isn’t as good as the 24Mbps they suggested i might get but much better than Zen’s 1Mbps. I’m starting to get annoyed by Be’s “planned outages”. Since I’ve taken the service on the 19th May, there have been three planned outages of the services, lasting several hours, during which they’ve conducted “necessary maintenance”. I don’t recall BT every having to do any maintenance on the exchange before, so quite what Be’s doing, I don’t know. But it’s starting to irritate.

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£20 to unlock a phone

It wasn’t £35 – it was £20 to get my phone unlocked.

Thanks to the helpful people who pointed out that there are plenty of free ways to unlock the phone that are available on the Internet. Unfortunately, I have a Nokia 6630 (I say unfortunately advisedly) which so far appears to be uncrackable. Nokia won’t even tell the network providers how to unlock the phones – they have to write off to Nokia and get a code sent back to them that’s specific to the phone being unlocked. So it’s £20 or an unusable phone, unfortunately. Still, given that’s less than a month’s line rental, I’m perfectly happy to pay up to be shot of Orange.

The end is in sight.

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Orange have the last laugh

Why did I think, even for a second, that escaping Orange’s clutches would be easy? They’ve locked my phone so that only Orange SIM cards will work with it. That means I either need to give them £35 or something to get it unlocked (assuming they agree) or I need to buy a new phone. Curse them all.

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Of freelances and holidays

The trouble with freelancing is working out when to have holidays. It’s not the same as when you’re self-employed. There are so many caveats, most of them of the paranoid rather than the actual kind.

  1. There’s the whole idea of not doing any work. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. So if you take a week off, that’s five days at your normal day rate (£650) you won’t be earning. Basically, whatever you’re paying for your holiday, freelances pay double. Of course, you factor that into your rates, but you see the start of the terrible thought processes?
  2. What will happen with your regular clients while you’re away? If you’re employed, someone at work will cover you, or they’ll hire in cover (maybe even a freelance). If you’re not around and you’re freelance, maybe they will find someone to cover you during your absence – maybe someone they like better and they’ll use instead of you in future. So now you have to time your holidays as much as possible around regular commissioning editors, just in case, except print days are just so spread around the month, trying to find a week – or even a few days – that don’t conflict with someone’s urgent delivery date is almost impossible
  3. What about new clients? Who’ll be answering the sales queries when you’re sunning yourself on the beach? You’ll get back only to find they’ve gone somewhere else because you weren’t available.
  4. Slippage. I was supposed to be on holiday yesterday, but I got summer lurgy on Monday, couldn’t finish a feature and had to spend yesterday writing it instead. Do I take another day off or just accept that as a day off I couldn’t take? Soon, you find all your days off have disappeared as you fit in just one last article that they begged you to take.
  5. There’s the problem of what you’ll be doing when you get back. If you don’t set up any work for your return, all those holiday days will be days when you’ve not been pitching. That means the first few days after the holiday will be days without work while you start pitching again. Which means less money again.

I’m supposed to be having a couple of days off right now. I need it after working a fortnight of double shifts at the end of last month (subbing by day, writing by night). Instead, I’ve spent the morning blogging and pitching. I still have to return a prospective new client’s phone call from yesterday. And then there’s all those low-priority emails I have to answer.

I’m going to die an early death of a stress disorder, I know it.

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Am I finally leaving Orange?

Called Orange a minute ago to let them know I wanted to leave. Well, I tried anyway. I called 150 from my mobile. After being asked to press 1 to confirm it was a mobile, not a broadband query, I was told that 1 was an invalid menu option. Tried calling back but I couldn’t even get through. So I had to call Orange the mobile phone network from a landline to get through.

Quelle surprise. They hadn’t received my cancellation letter. How did I not see that coming? Oh wait. I did.

Still, the man did I ask why I was leaving. It took a long time to explain everything.

I asked for a PAC number to migrate my phone number over to Virgin. “Well, if you do want a PAC number, you’ll have to pay for a further 30 days line rental”. And if I don’t? “Well, you’ll still have to give 30 days notice you want to terminate the contract.” I did. “Well, we didn’t receive it.”

So 30 days of Orange either way. Oh well. It’ll all soon be over. I’ve already got my Virgin SIM card so I’ll be swapping over today, I think.

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Be wary of the PowerBook battery

I bought my laptop about three years ago. It’s a PowerBook G4 12“. There have been things wrong with it since day one, including an odd tendency to crash at random intervals, no matter what operating system I’m using, if I happen to have moved it recently – obviously a useful feature in a laptop.

However, it’s been getting worse. The ”7“ key keeps falling off; there’s some great big black marks on the wrist-rests, either caused by fused toner cartridge or by the G4 superheating its outer coating to the point where it starts to carbonise. The battery life has also dropped off, and until a couple of days had dropped to about an hour and half during normal usage and less than 40 minutes if I’m playing a DivX. I had bought an extra battery at the same time as the laptop, but about a year ago it started to refuse charge.

Miraculously, though, I tried charging it again yesterday and it works just fine. I’ve now gone from under 40 minutes of battery life to over three hours. The moral of this story, then, is always to buy a spare battery, but to avoid using it until your main battery has gone pear-shaped. And also, never trust Apple to produce a battery that has any kind of longevity in everyday use.

UPDATE: Incidentally, finally having battery power again meant I was able to test the Notebook feature of Word 2004, which allows you to type notes as Word records via your Mac’s microphone. It’s actually pretty good. The quality was fine, the file didn’t get too large and you’re able to play back the audio at (almost) the corresponding points to your typing. I’ll be using that feature again, I think.